ARGONAUT BOOKS

The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. 'In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey', the narrator recalls. 'Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket.' And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.